crisps - the experiment

Yesterday saw the revival of my wonderful bake dates with Rory. (For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, me and my lovely assistant Rory get together sporadically and cook something we're too intimidated to try on own and then tell each other at length about how amazing we are. They're great fun altogether.) It's been a while since we last got together in the kitchen and when he arrived laden with dinner goodies and enthusiasm I must admit my enthusiasm was nowhere to be found. I just couldn't really be bothered. Why wouldn't I just go to the shop and buy a bag of crisps to go with our movie? They'd probably taste way better than anything we could make ourselves right? Wrong. The crisp experiment was a total success and as soon as we started my mood changed from lethargic to terribly excited. Sad isn't it? But lets not get too ahead of ourselves. There's plenty to talk about here.

oven roasted crisps

deep fried crisps

 The task we set ourselves was to try and make homemade crisps from scratch on which we could munch while we enjoyed a movie and a glass of wine. In the interests of science we tried two methods. We did oven roasted and deep fried. The conclusion I came to was that the worse something is for you the better it tastes. As much as I wanted the oven baked variety to come out on top, it would appear nothing beats deep frying. The deep fried crisps were light, crunchy and tasted of potato. The oven baked were either floppy or hard and chewy. They never got a good crunch on them and didn't have a nice potato flavour. So, there it is. Debate closed. 

the offensive oven baked crisps

the delectable deep fried version

Having said that, we used a potato peeler to slice the potatoes thinly. It worked brilliantly for the deep fried crisps but perhaps had we used a knife and made slightly thicker crisps for the oven, they would have come out better. I'll have to wait for another day to figure that one out.  

Now as far as I understand it the only proper way to flavour crisps is the addition of powdered flavour which will stick to the crisp. With limited powdered flavourings in the old press we tried to come up with alternative ways of flavouring them. Some worked, some didn't. 

It was easier to get the flavours on the oven roasted crisps as you could brush them with flavoured oils before putting them in the oven. The deep fried ones simply had to be tossed in flavour after you'd fried them so you couldn't use anything too wet or they'd get soggy. Here's what we came up with.

the flavours

Cheese and onion - everyone's favourite flavour (well, actually mine's salt and vinegar, except when in a pub, then it's cheese and onion all the way. weird). This we achieved by infusing olive oil with grated parmesan and red onion which we then dabbed onto the crisps after they were fried, or in the case of the oven roasted, before they were roasted. The flavour was great, but you have to be careful not to put too much on the deep fried crisps as it can make them too oily. Hard to tell on the oven baked as they tasted so awful anyway. Also, it was brought to my attention by my lovely assistant that Tayto invented the cheese and onion crisp. How did I not know this before? Well done Mr. Tayto. Bake dates are all about learning you know.

Salt and vinegar - we only tried these on the deep fried version. I coated a dish with a small amount of vinegar (we tried balsamic which was a bit too mild and red wine which I preferred), then threw some coarse sea salt in and tossed the freshly cooked chips quickly round the dish so they wouldn't get too soggy before turning them out into a serving bowl. This worked really well, but you do have to be careful not to use too much vinegar, or leave them in for too long or they'll go soggy.

Sweet chilli - I wasn't sure this one really worked. Again we infused some oil with chilli, sugar, rice wine vinegar and soy sauce and basted the oven baked crisps. As we only tried it on the oven baked crisps (it would have been too oily for the deep fried ones) it was hard to tell if it was any good. (The oven baked crisps really were awful.)

Last but not least, a bit of late inspiration from Rory, saw a last minute concoction of chilli, Italian herbs and salt which was delicious. Simply toss your deep fried crisps in the mixture and eat. Yum. Possibly my favourite.

So that was the big crisp experiment. While the oven baked ones were a disaster, the deep fried ones really did taste as delicious as any you'd buy. Only problem is that they're kind of hard to enjoy when you realize just how bad they are for you.

Oh, and I can't finish this post without thanking Rory for the delicious meal he made me without which I never would have had the energy to fry anything.  It was a delicious pasta dish with pan fried chicken and rosemary. (I think he stole it from Gordan Ramsey. Here's the recipe)

A tale of two halves

I wasn't going to post about my cooking efforts yesterday because they left me feeling utterly deflated and to be honest like a bit of a loser in the kitchen department. But it doesn't seem right to only write about the good stuff and I'm sure there was some learning/character building in my humiliation somewhere. So, pride swallowed, I will proceed.



The reason for yesterday's experiments was that I had in my possession the mother of all courgettes. This thing was ginormous. This, I now realise was probably where I went wrong. When a courgette is so big that it has become a marrow and left it's courgette essence behind, it no longer acts like a courgette. Surprise surprise. Anyway. I got this beast from my friend's dad's allotment, which for the record was one of the best kept pieces of horticulture I've ever seen. (Curses for not taking my camera) Anyway he gave me the beast and suggested a courgette cake, which sounded like just the job. One online search later and I had these two recipes to try and amazingly they weren't from Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall but my other all time favourite Nigel Slater. One was for a courgette cake and the other was for a courgette bake.


Well both efforts were pretty much pants. I don't think it was the recipe's fault, more the fact that I used marrow instead of courgette but made no allowances for this. The cake was supposed to be in the oven for an hour, at which point I checked it and it was still liquid inside. I left it in for another half hour but it still didn't seem right. When it came to cutting it was very crumbly and quick to fall apart. I may have been a little impatient in not letting it cool fully but it seemed to punish me excessively for this.



The bake, which looked delicious in the recipe was disappointing to say the least. I added a bit of lasagna to make it a bit more substantial for my dinner but no matter how long I left it in the oven, the marrow wouldn't soften properly and the sauce just dried out. I stupidly left the skins on the marrow thinking they would soften on cooking but they didn't. The flavours were yum so I'll probably try it again with softer courgettes and a few adjustments. Anyway, one disappointing dinner later and I'd learned my lessons. I hate learning.


What a difference a day makes......

So it was with a heavy heart that I looked forward to today's, what is turning into a very regular, bake date with Rory. This week Gyoza.....and, thank God, they worked.....brilliantly.


...so I haven't given up on it all just yet. One bad day won't get me down...etc.....

This was the recipe. We cheated and bought our own wrappers. Making your own seemed very time consuming and I wasn't up to another failure. The filling is dead easy to make and allows you to do lots of fun chopping!
The actual cooking is the hardest part and just takes a bit of getting used to as I found out. After last week's deep frying success I was totally blaze and unprepared for the gyoza cooking. Sure, the recipe says throw the water in on top of the hot oil, grand, no bother, nothing could possibly go wrong there! Right. So after a gentle reminder that oil and water don't mix so well, we got the hang of it and it was plain sailing from there. The results were delicious and we scoffed about 15 of them in about 30 seconds.

Thanks Rory for another great bake date. Whatever next?

churrotastic

Thanks to the help of my lovely assistant Rory my first attempt at deep frying was not only a non life-threatening one, but remarkably hassle free yielding a delicious bounty of doughnutty yummyness. I've always been a little scared of large pots of hot oil but I'm quite drawn to things of a deep fried nature so with a bit of encouragement from Rory we decided to explore it together.

The goal for the day: make churros without setting the house on fire. Extra bonus points if they actually taste good.

I think it can be said that the day was a success. So much so that I think I'm going to be having regular bake dates with the lovely Rory in the weeks and months to come. Next adventure, gyoza. But that's for another day.

The churros turned out remarkably easy to make although the timing on the cooking was a little tricky to get the hang of, but after a bit of trial and error with a few slightly on-the-gooey-side doughnuts in the bunch, I think we got the hang of it. Great excuse to gobble them all up as we went along as well.

I got the recipe from (I sound like such a broken record) River Cottage. It was basically a choux pastry for the batter. I was intrigued to find a very different recipe from Nigella Lawson and fully intend on making a comparison between the two sometime in the not too distant future, being the extreme kitchen nerd that I am. Should anyone care about the outcome I will of course bore you with that as and when it happens.